Since my Because Reasons post, I’ve been collecting examples. I’m sure a search would turn up more, but I’m enjoying collecting them in their native habitats.

“well, okay, maybe not the dairy free part, because cheese”

This was a sentence fragment from an online messageboard.

“I had catastrophic coverage, but no maternity coverage (private insurance because self-employed)…”

Also a sentence from an online messageboard. This sentence is ambiguous syntactically; it could actually be from an older pattern which is referred to in the Language Log post, a kind of “x because y” pattern.

Because, honestly, FUCK the whole idea of cooking an expensive and time-consuming holiday meal for people who cancel at the last minute because: “paperwork.”

But that’s okay, because – bourbon.

These were also sourced from the same messageboard, and are interesting because internal punctuation.* Internal punctuation is also found in a lot of the Languange Log examples. It suggests that the writer knows that something is being elided, at least semantically and perhaps syntactically.

“If you want to go to the next step in the route manually, you now swipe from left to right instead of tapping on the arrow. Because gestures.

This is from an article about Google Maps published in July 2013.

No, go away. I just want a salad because ranch.

Eating: A manifesto, from Rookie Magazine, July 2012

The most important thing about questpunk is to get plenty of sleep, because dreams.

A tweet from October 2013.

“Why is it spelled that way?”
“Because English.”

This one was a verbal exchange between a coworker paraphrasing her six-year-old, and me.

“Why there is a baby rat in my closet?”
“Because cats.”

Quoted dialogue from a Facebook post written by a friend of mine, November 2013.

Hope to see everybody at @busproject‘s “Jingle Bus” this year! Because DEMOCRACY.

Also a tweet, from November 2013.

*Originally I wrote this in Standard English as “because of the internal punctuation”, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to change it.